Whether you’re a digital marketing noob or a seasoned pro, you’ve likely noted that tracking the industry’s ceaseless onslaught of terms, phrases, platforms, channels, tools, algorithms, and targeting methods is no small task. Indeed, the digital marketing train chugs along at what can feel like warp speed—when you’re not paying attention, it’s easy to fall behind and find yourself lost in a strange land that speaks a strange language.
At Good & Gold, we take pride in tracking the front edges of the industry, but we also aim to simplify things for our clients, and pay attention to what’s truly important. In other words, we separate the wheat from the chaff to develop strategies and benchmarks for ourselves and our clients that are built to deliver concrete results—not bells and whistles. We’re here to help you make sense of the chaos so that you can focus on what matters most: your business.
Below, you’ll find the terms we talk about most when strategizing and reporting for our clients or for our own marketing efforts. Whether you’re tackling your own digital marketing or working with an agency, this little glossary should give you a good lay of the land.
Sales Funnel: The concept of leading customers through a series of events or actions that can be mapped out in the shape of a funnel. The broadest level at the top of the funnel would involve attracting users to your website, after which they move down the funnel as they download a resource or sign up for your email list, after which they (ideally) move to the bottom of the funnel and become a paying customer.
Brand Personality: A set of human characteristics that are attributed to a brand. An effective brand increases its brand equity by having a consistent set of traits expressed through all of its content and communications that a specific consumer segment enjoys.
Click-Through Rate (CTR): The percentage of the people who saw a search result, ad, or e-mail who then clicked through to your website. (clicks / impressions=CTR)
Conversion Rate: The percentage of the people who clicked through to your website who then took a positive action, such as purchasing something or signing up for a newsletter.
Cost Per Click (CPC): The amount you pay on an advertising platform for each click.
Cost Per Thousand Impressions (CPM): The amount you pay on an advertising platform per thousand times people see your ad.
Cost Per Acquisition (CPA): How much it costs to acquire a new customer—sometimes stated as cost per conversion.
Return on Ad Spend (ROAS): Gross revenue generated for every dollar spent on advertising. (revenue from ad campaign / cost of ad campaign = ROAS)
Customer Lifetime Value (LTV): A prediction of the net profit attributed to the entire future relationship with a customer. (To determine LTV, multiply the average purchase value by the average number of sales in a customer’s lifetime by your comany’s gross margin.)
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): The total sales and marketing cost required to earn a new customer over a specific time period.
Chatbot: A computer program designed to simulate conversation with human users, especially over the Internet.
Impression: A single display of a particular ad or search result on a web page.
Bounce Rate: The percentage of people who visit your website but leave without visiting any other page.
Canonical Tag: A bit of code that tells search engines which page is preferred when two URLs are similar or duplicate. (Most commonly, this tag is used when you have products or content that is accessible by multiple URLs.)
Search Engine Results Page (SERP): The page displayed by a web search engine in response to a query by a searcher. Every time you perform a Google search, you are greeted by a SERP.
Meta Tag: Hidden bits of code on your website that help determine the various ways that your site appears within search engines, from supplying the “title” and “description” that appear in Google to telling search engines what kind of business you are and what products you offer.
Sitemap: This is really just what it sounds like—a map listing the pages on your website that allows search engines like Google and Bing to identify where pages are, what order they come in, their importance, and how to generally navigate your site.
Long Tail Keywords: The specific, three- or four-word phrases that potential customers use when searching for your product or service. These are often easier and quicker to rank for in search engines, and can account for the bulk of a website’s traffic.
4xx Error: This status code indicates that the request for the resource contains bad syntax or cannot be filled for some other reason; the server should provide an explanation of the error situation.
Schema Markup: A piece of code you can add to a page’s HTML to help search engines understand what your website is about and what type of information it contains.
Paid Search: Also referred to as Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Paid Placement, or Pay Per Click, paid search allows advertisers to pay to be listed within the Search Engine Results Pages for specific keywords or phrases.
Quality Score: A numerical score Google AdWords assigns to ads and campaigns based on ad quality, ad relevance, and landing page experience. Generally, the higher your quality score, the higher your ads can appear on a search engine results page.
Negative Keywords: Search terms that you actively exclude from a campaign, allowing you focus on more relevant keywords that will increase your return on investment.
Retargeting: Someone visits your website, and then after they exit and continue browsing, your ad appears as a display ad on other websites or social media channels that accept ads from the ad network you use for retargeting. (It’s a little creepy, but it works.)
Dynamic Retargeting: Essentially, next-level retargeting—serving ads to users who have been to your website that contain images and information about the exact item they viewed.
Behavioral Targeting: Serving advertising to people who should be receptive to your message given past web behavior such as purchases or websites visited.
Geo-Targeting & Geo-Fencing: Virtual perimeters for real-world geographic areas. These can be dynamically generated, as in a radius around a point location, or can be a predefined set of boundaries, enabling software to trigger a response (a digital ad or search result) when a mobile device enters or leaves a particular area.
Expanded Text Ads: Google has recently allowed users to include an additional headline (for a total of 3) and an additional description line (for a total of 2) in all text ads, allowing you to take up more space on the Search Engine Results Page and achieve higher click-through rates.
Affiliate Marketing: A strategy where businesses reward individual affiliates (people or organizations outside the business) for bringing in new customers or visitors through ads or content on the affiliate’s website. Affiliates receive payments or product discounts based on the number of customers they generate.
Referral Marketing: The method of promoting products or services to new customers through referrals, usually word of mouth.
Event Tracking: Using Facebook’s pixel implementation, you can track not just revenue and conversions, but a customer’s journey every step of the way, including form fills, cart additions, and newsletter sign-ups, all in one place.
Call to Action (CTA): A word or phrase used to inspire the end user to take a specific action, often via a button or another stylized link.
A/B Testing: An optimization technique that divides a list in two, then sends a different email version to each half to determine which variation converts best.
Bounce Rate: A percentage that measures how many emails have been returned by an email service. A bounce can happen because a subscriber’s email address either no longer exists, their inbox was full, or because a server was unavailable.
E-Mail Automation: A feature that enables you to send out messages to your customers at designated times, such as: When a subscriber signs up for your email list, when they perform an action on your website (like download an e-book), or when they add an item to their shopping cart but don’t complete the purchase (an “abandoned cart” email).
Drip Marketing: A sequence of communication that is written in advance, and then sent to prospective or current customers at pre-determined intervals to advance them through your sales funnel.
HTML: The acronym for Hypertext Markup Language, a standardized system for tagging text files to achieve font, color, graphic, and hyperlink effects on web pages.
CSS: The acronym for Cascading Style Sheets, a style sheet language used for describing the presentation of a document written in a markup language like HTML, including colors, layout, and fonts.
Javascript: An object-oriented scripting language commonly used to make HTML pages more dynamic and interactive.
HEX Code: A code used in HTML and CSS to designate a specific color, often appearing after the pound sign (#).
User Experience (UX): How a user feels when interfacing with a system such as a website, a web application, or desktop software. UX often determines how well a website converts or how much time users spend on a website or application.
Checkout Flow: The page-by-page experience a user has completing a purchase on an e-commerce website.
Below the Fold: In newspaper terms, “below the fold” refers to content on the bottom half of the page (below the physical fold in the paper). In web design terms, “below the fold” refers to the content that a user would generally have to scroll in order to view.
As we enter Q4, the holiday season brings both opportunities and challenges for lifestyle brands. This year, with Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday falling later than usual, brands must navigate a compressed calendar. With only one shot to get their promotions right, early preparation and a well-executed strategy will be key to maximizing revenue. Here are some tips and a detailed roadmap to ensure your brand thrives during this busy season.
Now that you're armed with essential tips, here’s a week-by-week roadmap to guide you through the holiday season.
Week 1 (Early October): Establish Your Promotion and Budget
Week 2 (Mid-October): Prepare Creative Assets and Website
Week 3 (Late October): Build Campaigns and Get Gift Guides Live
Week 4 (First Week of November): Finalize and Test Promotions
Week 5 (Mid-November): Launch Your Holiday Campaigns
Week 6 (Thanksgiving Week): Make the Final Push for Black Friday/Cyber Monday
Week 7 (Post-Shipping Cutoff): Emergency Gifting and Gift Card Campaigns
To make the most of Q4, lifestyle brands must balance early preparation with last-minute flexibility. A strong, well-executed strategy—starting early, using personalization, and leveraging urgency—can help brands stand out in a crowded market and maximize revenue. Stay tuned for more service-specific holiday tips, and if you need assistance refining your Q4 approach, the team at Good & Gold is here to help. Contact us today for expert guidance.
In the rapidly evolving digital landscape, staying ahead of the curve is essential for any eCommerce and online business. One of the latest innovations shaking up the industry is Google's Search Generative Experience (SGE).
But what is SGE, and how is it impacting click-through rates (CTR) for eCommerce websites and online businesses?
This article delves into the implications of SGE for eCommerce businesses, exploring how this new technology affects search behaviors and what businesses can do to adapt.
Search Generative Experience (SGE) is Google's groundbreaking feature that uses advanced generative AI to enhance the traditional search engine experience. Unlike the standard search algorithms that focus on ranking pages based on keywords, SGE delivers more contextually relevant, personalized, and interactive results. This AI-driven approach aims to understand the user's intent better and provide them with comprehensive answers directly on the search engine results page (SERP).
SGE can generate detailed responses to queries, often pulling from multiple sources to create a synthesized answer that appears at the top of the search results. This innovation marks a significant shift in how users interact with search engines and, consequently, how businesses need to approach search engine optimization (SEO) and marketing.
This change aligns with Google's broader mission to make information universally accessible and useful but introduces new challenges and opportunities for online businesses.
The introduction of SGE is significantly altering the landscape of CTR, which is a key metric for evaluating the effectiveness of search-based marketing strategies. Here’s how:
With SGE providing detailed answers directly within the search results, users may no longer feel the need to click through to a website to find the information they need. This shift could result in a decrease in CTR for traditional organic search results, as users might find their queries sufficiently answered without leaving the search engine results page (SERP).
Traditional SEO practices, which have long focused on optimizing content for specific keywords to rank higher in search results, will have to evolve. Businesses will need to consider how to optimize for SGE, focusing on providing content that complements the AI-generated responses or offers value beyond what SGE can provide directly.
As SGE becomes more prevalent, the importance of securing featured snippets and rich results (like images, videos, and other interactive content) grows. These elements are more likely to capture attention within an SGE-enhanced search environment, offsetting some of the CTR declines for traditional links.
While overall CTR might decline, the traffic that does click through may be of higher quality. Users who proceed beyond the SGE responses are more interested in the products, leading to better conversion rates.
SGE is transforming the way consumers search for and discover products online, which has significant implications for eCommerce businesses. Here are some of the key impacts:
One of the most immediate impacts of SGE on eCommerce businesses is the potential reduction in organic traffic.
For many eCommerce businesses, particularly smaller ones, brand visibility on Google’s SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) is crucial for attracting customers. However, as SGE offers more detailed answers within the search results themselves, the space for traditional organic listings may become more limited. This can make it more challenging for eCommerce brands to stand out, especially if they are not among the top results or if their content is not featured in AI-generated snippets.
The rise of SGE asks for a shift in SEO and content strategies for eCommerce businesses. Traditional keyword optimization is no longer be sufficient. Instead, ecommerce businesses need to focus on creating content that is optimized for AI interpretation, such as by addressing common customer queries concisely and directly. Additionally, structured data and schema markup are becoming increasingly important to ensure that product information is easily understood and featured by SGE.
On the positive side, SGE has the potential to enhance the customer experience by providing more accurate and tailored search results. For example, if a user searches for a specific product, SGE could generate a detailed product comparison or a summary of reviews, helping customers make more informed decisions. This could lead to higher quality traffic, as users who do click through to an eCommerce site may be more ready to purchase.
SGE's ability to present rich media and visual content directly within the search results is another factor that eCommerce businesses must consider. High-quality images, videos, and other rich content formats play a more significant role in attracting attention within an SGE-dominated SERP. Businesses will need to invest in creating compelling visual content that can stand out in this new environment.
To thrive in the age of SGE, eCommerce businesses must adapt their strategies to align with this new search landscape. Here are some actionable steps:
Focus on creating content that is easily digestible by AI, such as concise product descriptions, FAQs, and other content that directly answers common questions. Implementing structured data is also essential to ensure that your products are prominently featured in AI-generated responses.
Invest in high-quality images, videos, and other forms of rich media that can enhance your visibility within SGE's search results. Consider creating video content that showcases your products, as videos are more likely to be highlighted by SGE.
As SGE improves the quality of search results, ensure that your website provides an equally high-quality user experience. This includes fast loading times, mobile optimization, and a seamless checkout process, all of which are critical for converting high-quality traffic into sales.
SGE is a game-changer in the world of search, offering users more detailed and contextually relevant answers directly within the SERP. For eCommerce businesses, understanding **what is SGE** and how it impacts CTR is critical for adapting to this new search paradigm. While SGE presents challenges, such as potential declines in organic traffic and increased competition for visibility, it also offers opportunities for businesses to attract higher-quality traffic and improve conversion rates. By optimizing content for AI, investing in rich media, and refining paid search strategies, eCommerce businesses can continue to thrive in an increasingly AI-driven market.
In the world of digital marketing, data is king. Understanding how your ads perform, where your traffic comes from, and how users interact with your website is crucial for making informed decisions. While standard ad platform tracking and Google Analytics 4 (GA4) offer valuable insights, they come with certain limitations. In this blog post, we'll explore the pitfalls of standard ad platform tracking, the challenges of GA4, and how third-party tracking solutions can provide a more comprehensive and accurate picture of your marketing efforts.
Standard ad platform tracking, such as those provided by Facebook Ads or Google Ads, often suffer from platform bias. Each platform tends to attribute conversions to itself, leading to over-reporting. This bias can distort your understanding of which channels are truly driving results, making it difficult to allocate your budget effectively.
Ad platforms typically track data within their own ecosystem. This siloed approach means that cross-platform insights are limited. If you're running campaigns across multiple channels, it becomes challenging to get a unified view of your customer journey and overall marketing performance.
Standard ad platforms often use last-click attribution by default, which credits the final touchpoint before a conversion. This model can undervalue upper-funnel activities like awareness and consideration campaigns that play a crucial role in guiding customers down the funnel.
GA4 introduces a new way of tracking and analyzing data, which can be complex and require a steep learning curve. For marketers used to Universal Analytics, adapting to GA4's event-based model and navigating its new interface can be daunting.
GA4 often employs data sampling when processing large datasets, which can lead to inaccuracies. Sampled data might not fully represent your actual traffic and user behavior, leading to potentially misleading insights.
With increasing privacy regulations like GDPR and CCPA, GA4 has implemented stricter data collection practices. While this is a positive step for user privacy, it can result in less granular data and limitations on tracking certain user interactions.
Third-party tracking solutions excel in providing cross-platform attribution, allowing you to see the complete customer journey across multiple channels. This holistic view helps in accurately identifying which touchpoints contribute most to conversions, enabling better budget allocation.
Third-party trackers often utilize advanced algorithms and methodologies to reduce data inaccuracies and biases. This ensures that you get a more precise understanding of your marketing performance without over-reliance on any single platform's data.
Unlike standard ad platforms and GA4, third-party tracking solutions offer greater customization options. You can tailor tracking to fit your specific business needs, set up custom attribution models, and create detailed reports that align with your marketing goals.
Third-party solutions provide in-depth reporting capabilities, combining data from various sources into a single dashboard. This unified reporting helps in making more informed decisions and understanding the true impact of your marketing efforts.
Many third-party tracking providers prioritize privacy compliance, offering tools and features that help you adhere to regulations while still gaining valuable insights. This balance ensures that you respect user privacy without sacrificing data quality.
While standard ad platform tracking and GA4 offer valuable insights, they come with significant limitations that can hinder your ability to fully understand and optimize your marketing efforts. Third-party tracking solutions address these challenges by providing cross-platform attribution, enhanced accuracy, greater customization, comprehensive reporting, and advanced privacy compliance.
Investing in a robust third-party tracking solution can be a game-changer for your marketing strategy, helping you make data-driven decisions with confidence and ultimately driving better results for your business.
In the world of branding, every project tells a story—a narrative creative from collaboration, creativity, and a shared vision for the future. At Good & Gold, we've had the privilege of embarking on such journeys with remarkable entrepreneurs like Amanda Hughes, the visionary behind The Ice Cream Stand and Cream & Coffee.
In the summer of 2023, Amanda, the owner of The Ice Cream Stand nestled in Downtown Syracuse, approached us with a desire to breathe new life into her beloved ice cream shop. Collaboratively, we embarked on a mission to create a vibrant brand identity that captured the essence of her woman-owned ice cream shop.
From brainstorming sessions to design mockups, together we crafted a lively brand identity that perfectly complemented the spirit of her shop—a colorful celebration of homemade delights and community connection.
Fast forward to early 2024, Amanda approached us again with a new vision taking shape. Enter Cream & Coffee, the Ice Cream Stand's cool, homemade little sister—a fusion parlor nestled by the lake in Skaneateles, NY. With Amanda's business plan in hand, we embarked on a new mission, this time helping build a brand from the ground up.
Drawing inspiration from the rustic charm and historic allure of Skaneateles, we set out to create a brand identity that felt warm and inviting. Handmade touches, warm neutral tones, and a touch of nostalgia of the historic lake town formed the cornerstone of Cream & Coffee's brand identity.
The result of this branding journey is two unique brand identities, each hand crafted to honor the personality and individuality of the shops they represent. Our experience with The Ice Cream Stand and Cream & Coffee has been a testament to the power of collaboration, creativity, and a shared passion for capturing the vision and essence of a small brand.
At Good & Gold, we take pride in contributing to the journey of turning entrepreneurs' and small businesses' dreams into reality. To learn more about the journey of branding & logo design, sign up for our monthly newsletter to get access to our latest eBook - Introduction to Logo Design & Brand Development.